Tag: art

This is one of my occasional “grab bag” or “miscellany” posts, simply sharing sites and images I have come across and tagged for one reason or another.

• Films for Action (http://www.filmsforaction.org) is a site which documents activist movies, much more methodically than I did in my Greenie Moviesposts last year. The page which first caught my attention is their wall of films (above) but they have some interesting articles as well (I particularly liked their overview of worldwide moves towards reducing wage inequality) and a useful list of “independent media” in a sidebar on the article index page.

• These hyper-stylised Renaissance-inspired insect drawings might hardly rate a mention after the calendar but they do do something with insect forms that I have never seen before, and I do like anything that encourages a positive attitude towards insects and, in fact, the whole biosphere in which we are so intricately embedded.

• Finally I will share a Facebook page. I can hardly believe I’m doing this – I dismissed FB entirely for years as a waste of time and bandwidth, a horrible fad which pandered to lowest-common-denominator narcissism, a time-sink … and it is still, in fact, all of those if we allow it to be. On the other hand, it has become a useful means of spreading independent news and generating grass-roots crowd energy; and it has spawned its own visual language which, as I said in earlierposts, is sometimes beautiful and often fun. Trust Me, I’m an “Eco-designer”https://www.facebook.com/GreenSetGo enjoys the possibilities to the full. Reading the “About” info reveals the FB page is run by a real eco-design business … and there is nothing wrong with that, either.

Innovation 2 – Studio2 Exhibition
OpeningMarch 1 at 7pm
In a collaboration between Finlay Homes and Artcetera Studio2, local artists were invited to choose waste materials from the building of Finlay Homes new ‘Innovation’ home, to create artworks for the display home. A range of materials from steel to plasterboard, wiring to tiles, and even lowly rust was swooped up eagerly for transformation into art.

The ‘Innovation’ home will be an educational and interactive example of sustainable living for the tropics. Not only is it designed with sustainability in mind, but it will have monitoring systems running to allow visitors to see just how much energy is being saved. As part of that environmental commitment, and in an attempt to reduce the staggering amount of building waste that heads for landfill, the furniture and artwork will be made from offcuts, recycled and waste materials.

I missed the opening but got there with my camera on the Sunday. It’s a small show but with a wide variety of good works; the two pictured here are from the two ends of the art-to-craft spectrum on display.

Ephemera in the Mist is an environmental art festival featuring installations in the rainforest of Paluma between August 25th and September 9th. I went to the inaugural festival last year and enjoyed it – see this report. This year’s event follows the same format. It has two key components:

Rainforest Organic Art Trail, a series of site-specific ephemeral installations built in the rainforest around Paluma. The artworks will be created within strict environmental guidelines and will be left in situ to gradually disintegrate back into the forest floor.

Village Sculpture Walk, a separate show in Paluma Village of enduring sculptural works with an environmental theme, created predominantly from recycled materials.

Cash prizes will be awarded for the People’s Choice in each of these two exhibitions.

Complementary activities include an exhibition of small artworks in the Community Hall; an artists’ marketplace on the village green; free art workshops with guest and local tutors; nature walks guided by a resident naturalist; artist talks; and a display of environmentally proactive products and organisations.

Official opening: August 25thWorkshops & Artists Market: August 15th & 26th. Entry is free.Sculpture trail will be on show until Sept 9thMore information: 0418 750 854 (Sue Tilley) or http://www.ephemerainthemist.com/

‘Photography’ means ‘writing with light’ and that’s what we do with the camera – write or (better) draw on the film or sensor with the light coming through the lens. There’s nothing to say the picture must be realistic or even representational, and these few don’t try to be.

Gesture 1Gesture 2Gesture 3

Sitting on Picnic Bay beach on Magnetic Island on Sunday evening I liked the lights of Townsville across the bay. My camera told me it wanted a very long exposure to capture them – four or five seconds – so I thought I would make a virtue of necessity and move the camera around deliberately while the shutter was open. Two different gestures with the camera produced the first two images.

On the ferry approaching the brightly-lit docks a little later I did the same sort of thing with a rather shorter exposure to produce the third image above.

Climate change is a science-heavy issue with enormous social and political implications so it makes sense that responses to it come from all sorts of people in all sorts of media. This little collection looks at visual art.

There was an excellent exhibition of art inspired by climate change in Melbourne a couple of months ago. It was reported on ABC TV’s 7.30 and that report is now available as video and transcript at http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2012/s3416543.htm. (The video is also on YouTube.) Metro Gallery’s page about its show, here, doesn’t add much but does mention a film of the project, which could be worth tracking down, too.

Looking for it a few minutes ago, I came across an American sculptor, Nathalie Miebach, who translates climate numbers into colourful artworks which look more like intriguingly complicated toys than anything else. Read the article here and, if you like, click through to the associated photo gallery.

I have known the work of street artist Banksy for quite a long time but I haven’t mentioned it on Green Path before. Here is his graphic comment on global warming.

Political cartoons are also art, of a kind, and that is my excuse for squeezing Climatesight’s collection of cartoons http://climatesight.org/image-collection/ into this post. Here’s a sample from it to encourage you to investigate further:

P.S. (27.3.12) Just found a couple more here – scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Insects of Townsville

Many of my older posts link to Graeme Cocks’ excellent “Insects of Townsville.” Late in 2016 it moved to http://kooka.info/orders.html. The new site is still incomplete but is your best hope of finding the information or photo.